Frozen (laptop) Memory

There have been a lot of news articles about the discovery at Princeton that cooling the RAM chips of a laptop to -50C enable a quick restart from sleep mode, and potentially allowing retrieval of encryption keys residing in the chips.  The news media has been treating this as a major vulnerability.

You take the stolen, sleeping laptop, remove the cover to the RAM chips, freeze them with an inverted can of “canned air”, and then “cut the power and then re-attach the power, and by doing that will get access to the contents of memory - including the critical encryption keys.” It’s being touted everywhere as a “major vulnerability”

Umm, sure… I do it all the time and the encryption key just pops right up on screen in a blinking box labelled “Encryption Key”.  Movie and TV writers, freshly off-strike, are probably dying to use this in a story.  That math guy on “Numb3rs” will pull it off in the bad guy’s apartment with whatever stuff is lying around and the seconds ticking off toward disaster. 

Essentially what the hacker needs to do is remove the chips from the laptop, put them - still frozen - in another laptop that is running a memory-analysis utility, access the chips and “dump” the memory contents to the a file on the hard drive.  Or somehow load a new operating system into the first laptop without writing to any of the memory in its RAM chips.  Simple! 

What Professor Felton and his team found was that cooling memory chips “enhanced the retention of data in memory chips.” That’s a long way from a usable hacking technique.  So you have to power completely down if you think your laptop might get stolen and it contains a huge database of people’s personal information.  Or… don’t carry stuff like that around on laptops! There.  Problem solved. 

Posted by George on 03/05/08 at 06:33 AM
Geeky • Security • (5) Comments • Link
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